Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> On 16 Nov 2009, at 01:12, Todd Benson wrote:
>> it's totally reasonable to see something go chaotic because of these
>> things.
>
> This isn't an issue of chaotic behaviour (that has a very fixed
> meaning mathematically) but of unnoticeable error. The difference
> between 1e10-13 and 2e10-13 matters a lot when working on a system
> which needs to be accurate to a resolution of 1e10-14 but not when
> working to a resolution of 1e10-4. The additional nine decimal places
> tell us nothing meaningful in this latter case as we'll still end up
> rounding the result to zero.
>
>> For a short and unimportant game I'm playing, I wouldn't be upset.
>> But, for a game that takes 10's of hours and have it ride my butt
>> later at a crucial moment, I might just call that a bug.
>
> That's not a bug but a fundamental outcome of the nature of binary
> coded non-integral numbers.
If it gives you the wrong answer, it's a bug. Period. If your
representation cannot give you the precision you need for the task at
hand, then you need a different representation. Period. The end user
doesn't care about your representation -- he cares about getting the
right answer.
[...]
> BCD also
> does nothing to resolve the problem of how to represent irrational
> numbers such as дл.
No, becuase that's impossible to do with a finite representation AFAIK.
If I'm wrong, I would love to know how this can be done.
[...]
>
> Ellie
>
> Eleanor McHugh
> Games With Brains
> http://slides.games-with-brains.net
> ----
> raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason
Best,
--
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
marnen / marnen.org
--
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